Amazing Nature: Collared Earthstar Fungus

I decided yesterday morning not to head home right away after dropping my kids off at school. The forest, which is roughly three kilometers from my town, is where I deliberately turned my scooter.

Early in the morning is a good time to go mushroom hunting in the forest. The grass and ground were still damp from the morning dew because the weather wasn't yet heated. It so happened that the previous day had also been rainy.

I saw something there that almost passed for a wildflower that fell from a tree. I picked it up and looked at it closely.

Others were close by, and some of them appeared sticky on the dry, moist branch. It wasn't until then that I realized it was some sort of fungus.

The common name of the mushroom is "collared earthstar." Geastrum triplex , the scientific name for this mushroom, belongs to the family Geastraceae.

If you're not careful, you can mistake a juvenile mushroom for a puffball mushroom—unfortunately, I didn't discover any juvenile mushrooms there.

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A mature mushroom has a fruiting body that is split into 6-7 sections, much like flower petals, and contains a spore sac resembling a pomegranate on the inside. The "petals" are so fragile. If you touch it without being careful, it will break right away.

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^{All of the images here are my own work, taken with Xiaomi POCO NFC smartphone and an assembled external macro lens.}